Naturally, there's only so much technology can do to solve your technology problems. To finish the job, you'll need something far more mysterious and powerful: Your mind.

Omnipresent gadgets have made our lives infinitely more convenient in some ways, but they've also taken over parts of our brains. A 2012 study found that 89 percent of undergraduates surveyed had experienced phantom phone vibrations — the sense that a smartphone-like device is vibrating when it's actually not.

Even if you're not feeling all tingly when you shouldn't be, you may be a victim of tech creep. E-mail, texts, Facebook messages and likes are all exactly the kinds of things that can be hard to ignore once they've got their hooks in our gray matter, says Denver-based licensed psychotherapist Larry Cappel.

“If you know about behavioral theory, like Pavlov's dogs stuff, intermittent reinforcement is the best kind to enforce a habit,” he says. “The Internet is really good about randomly rewarding you, but not every time.”

Remember the time you got nine “likes” in the first five minutes after posting a great landscape photo on Facebook? So does your sneaky, sneaky brain!

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Cappel says that not only is that kind of feedback just what your brain craves, but the constant stimulation can also be dangerously soothing.

“We aren't very good at being alone with our minds,” he says. “We tend to be anxious if there's no stimulation.”

If you find yourself distracted by the Internet — or anything else on your devices — you can try a low-tech or no-tech solution offered up by Cappel.

Low-tech: “There are all the practical things that you can do, like shut off your phone,” Cappel says. On his own phone he's disabled the alerts that pop up to tell him he's got an e-mail.

“I have a client who has trouble getting work done when he's working on his computer,” he says. “So he'll unplug his Internet cable.”

No-tech: Learn to live in the here and now, and leave those Facebook notifications and e-mails until an appropriate time comes along to process all of them. Cappel suggests developing mindfulness — essentially, the ability to pay a little more attention to what you're paying attention to.

“What mindfulness training really does is it teaches us to, as they say, be in the present moment,” Cappel says. “What's happening now is what our five senses are picking up at any given moment.”

He says you can use that to notice inefficiencies in how you're using your technology, and what those feel like — which can help you beat them.

“Actually when mindfulness is used as part of addiction treatment you get similar results,” he says. ” 'Oh, I have a craving to shoot heroin. Isn't that interesting? Let me just get curious about that craving. What does it feel like in my body? To crave the Internet. Or drugs. Facebook. Twitter.' ”

OK, fine, some tech: Cappel recommended a mindfulness app, saying there are several out there. But by his description, you might not need a specialized app for this.

“You set it to chime, a pretty little chime, at intervals throughout the day,” he says. “And you use those as mindfulness moments.

“One of the worst things about working at a computer is we get hyperfocused. It chimes, you stop, you take a breath, you stretch your eyeballs by looking at the four corners of the room or something like that.”

Cappel says this is great for people who sit down and get in the zone, and sort of forget to take regular breaks. Without the special app, you could just set your phone's alarm for a few times in the day.

“And then you can turn around and go back to work,” he says, “And actually, it's pretty refreshing.”

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